Father of Newtown shooter 'You can't get any more evil'

Denis J. O'Malley and John Pirro

Published 11:54 pm, Monday, March 10, 2014

Photo: Kateleen Foy, Photo By Kateleen Foy/Getty Imag

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Adam Lanza is pictured in this undated image from 2005 in Newtown, Connecticut. Twenty-six people were shot dead, including twenty children, after a gunman identified as Adam Lanza opened fire at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Lanza also reportedly had committed suicide at the scene. A 28th person, believed to be Nancy Lanza, found dead in a house in town, was also believed to have been shot by Adam Lanza. less

Adam Lanza is pictured in this undated image from 2005 in Newtown, Connecticut. Twenty-six people were shot dead, including twenty children, after a gunman identified as Adam Lanza opened fire at Sandy Hook ... more

Photo: Kateleen Foy, Photo By Kateleen Foy/Getty Imag

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Photograph of a birthday card from Peter Lanza to his son Adam found in the Lanza home on Yogananda Street in Newtown, Conn. The full Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting reports were released by the Connecticut State Police on Friday, Dec. 27, 2013. less

Photograph of a birthday card from Peter Lanza to his son Adam found in the Lanza home on Yogananda Street in Newtown, Conn. The full Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting reports were released by the ... more

In an article published Monday in The New Yorker, Peter Lanza provided new insight into his troubled son and his own experience since Dec. 14, 2012, coming to the conclusion that "You can't get any more evil" than his son Adam, who killed his mother, 20 children and six educators before taking his own life.

"That didn't come right away," said Peter Lanza, who is a vice president for taxes at a General Electric subsidiary.

"That's not a natural thing, when you're thinking about your kid. But, God, there's no question. There can only be one conclusion, when you finally get there. That's fairly recent, too, but that's totally where I am."

The article presented new details of Lanza's childhood and the progression of his social and behavioral problems, which Peter Lanza said may have stemmed from more than just Asperger's syndrome.

"It was crystal clear something was wrong," Lanza said of changes in his son's behavior that began when he entered middle school.

While the answer to why Lanza inflicted the massacre on the school he attended up to the start of sixth grade remains a mystery, Peter Lanza's revelations could be of assistance to the Sandy Hook Advisory Commission, a 16-member panel of experts created by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy to review current policy and make specific recommendations about school safety, mental health, and gun violence prevention.

Several members of the commission contacted by Hearst Connecticut Media on Monday said they had either read the article or would be reading it soon.

"It was very sad to read the whole article," said Patricia Keavney-Maruca, who serves on the State Board of Education as well as the governor's commission. "I don't think there was very much that was too surprising, but I think what it revealed was that Adam got much worse as time went on."

"A few of my colleagues sent out copies this morning," said Ron Chivinski, a Newtown Middle School teacher serving on the panel and commission member. "I haven't had a chance to see it yet, but I do plan to read it, since this is the first time he's spoken publicly about it."

Peter Lanza had previously agreed to help the commission obtain his son's school and medical records, and in January, met with Hamden Mayor Scott Jackson, chairman of the commission, for about an hour. Jackson could not be reached for comment Monday.

In the magazine interview, Peter Lanza said that the switch from school days spent in a single classroom to changing classes in middle school aggravated his son, whose "sensory overload" was so acute that his mother, Nancy Lanza, copied his school books in black and white because "he found color graphics unbearable."

Then Adam Lanza began to avoid eye contact, "developed a stiff, lumbering gait," stopped climbing trees or playing the saxophone and "said that he hated birthdays and holidays, which he had previously loved," the article states.

Along with efforts to have her son receive psychiatric treatment, Nancy Lanza considered moving to a school district known for programs with special needs children, briefly enrolled Adam in Catholic school and finally resorted to home schooling, teaching her son the humanities while her husband taught him the sciences, Peter Lanza said.

In time, Robert King, a psychiatrist at the Yale Child Study Center who assessed Adam at age 14, concluded that Nancy Lanza was "almost becoming a prisoner in her own house" due to her efforts to accommodate her son's behavior, he said in the article.

After separating from Nancy Lanza in 2001, Peter Lanza's contact with his younger son became less frequent. By the time of the shooting, he had not had contact with Adam in two years.

The Lanzas officially divorced in 2009 and Peter Lanza has since remarried. He currently lives in Fairfield County with his wife, Shelley Lanza.

It was not until the fall of 2009, according to the article, that Adam Lanza's "private obsession with killing" developed. It was around that time that Lanza began editing the Wikipedia pages of mass murderers of which he "seems to have been eerily well informed."

In the article, Lanza said doctors did not detect a violent disposition in Adam and the changes in his behavior that became more severe when he started middle school did not raise "alarms."

"If he had been a totally normal adolescent and he was well adjusted and then all of a sudden went into isolation, alarms would go off," Lanza said in the article. "But let's keep in mind that you expect Adam to be weird."

Peter Lanza said he now thinks that the Asperger's "veiled a contaminant," such as schizophrenia, from which Adam may have also been suffering.

Despite that, Lanza said that not an hour goes by that he does not think about the massacre.

"How much do I beat up on myself about the fact that he's my son? A lot," he said.

Retired Danbury educator George Hochsprung, whose wife, Dawn, the principal of Sandy Hook Elementary School, was one of Adam Lanza's first victim, said he heard some of the quotes from Peter Lanza's New Yorker story on the radio.

"I don't hold any animosity to (Peter Lanza). I can't walk in his shoes," Hochsprung said. "From what I heard, he was assuming a lot of the blame. One thing that I heard that was interesting was that he (Adam) had all kinds of psychiatric help. If those professionals were not able to notice his tendencies, how could we? I just imagine what I would do as a father if one of my children did something as insanely crazy like that."

Hochsprung said he didn't plan to read the story, but, he thought others should be slow to criticize Peter Lanza.

"Until you have walked in his shoes, you better be careful," Hochsprung said.

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said while improving the state of the mental health system may help stem the flood of gun violence, it should not be the prime motivating factor.

"We should be fixing the mental health system simply because it's broken, not just because it's part of the solution for the plague of gun violence across the country," Murphy said.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal also said he believes improving mental health would help to curb the incidence of gun violence in the country.

"I didn't know it was coming out, but I'm not sure if anybody knew it was coming out," she said. "I don't know if I'll read it or not."

Since the shooting, Peter Lanza has reached out to victims' families and met with two of them, according to the article.

The reason he speaks to the families and also why he spoke to The New Yorker is to "share information that might help the families or prevent another such event," the article states.

"I need to get some good from this," he is quoted in the article. "And there's no place else to find any good. If I could generate something to help them, it doesn't replace, it doesn't ... But I would trade places with them in a heartbeat if that could help."